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Notes -
I don’t recognize this guy anymore. He thinks people should refrain from searching for the truth because the search is not fair/random enough for him. Who cares? That which can be destroyed by the Truth should be, immediately. Whether you personally dislike Gay or politically oppose Ackman or just want clicks, I am thankful for any skeleton you happen to find in their closets. Scott is willing to let lies fester until such a time when they can all be revealed impartially, or something.
The problem is when the Overton window shifts. So what is safe today in a decade will be uncovered as a skeleton.
I mean, plagiarism was also considered a pretty big deal for an academic ten years ago.
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Imagine if everyone committed minor tax fraud in the course of day to day life, but only partisan Republican activists were prosecuted for it. Well, they're being destroyed by the Truth, right, so this is good?
Claudine Gay should've been fired. Fired for not being qualified, not for having done plagiarism. If Harvard scrapes the bottom of the barrel to find a black woman academic who hasn't committed plagiarism and elevates them to President, nothing's actually improved. The reason we have a plagiarism rule is because plagiarism is bad, not as a tool to use to take out opponents who've done other bad things, even when said opponents deserve it. It's a much more 'symmetric' weapon than the weapon one wants - 'she's not qualified, so she shouldn't have the job'.
Unironically Yes. The Truth will set us free.
In that case, something is deeply rotten in the kingdom, and the Truth has to start desinfecting somewhere. By comparison , the partisan point-scoring about who the truth harms first is of trivial importance.
Let me tell you a story about a helicopter pilot. He had noticed the fuel gauge was systematically under-estimating the fuel left. He learned to live with it, mentally adding dozens of liters to the reported volume every time. One day, he ran out of fuel and crashed. A mechanic had repaired the gauge. The pilot had accepted the lie, and so the lie killed him. And this was a man who had survived being shot down down over the USSR in a U-2 spy plane. Beware of normalizing lies and dysfunction.
The, imo correct, worry with that approach is that, so long as the stage is just Rufo and Gay and similar people dueling, that'll never happen - there'll be a hundred scandals every year, we'll perpetually be draining the swamp of the rot, and somehow it'll never go anywhere. It's not that Gay shouldn't be fired for plagiarism, it's that it just doesn't really matter, and that thinking it does is kinda a misdirection.
There are a lot more important lies than 'Gay didn't do plagiarism'! Not that one should object to her firing, but maybe not put your will behind the idea that the thing generating this is something that's useful in the long run.
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I think "only" is where this metaphor falls apart. Quite a lot of people get smacked for plagiarism, often less severe plagiarism than discovered here, both in Harvard and in the more general world. Perhaps those hits are only a small portion of all plagiarism that occurs, but it's clearly not something only partisans need fear.
This doesn't undermine Scott's broader point about journalist motivations, but that's separate from the question of Gay's 'destruction'.
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This Litany of Tarsky shit is probably the most edgy remnants of Yudkowskian writing - and it is of course highly unworkable as it can be subverted by almost childish level of effort besides numerous other flaws. As other people said, it can be used in support of anarcho-tyranny. In this case, we can investigate all Tarskyists and once we inevitably find them guilty of something, we can just hand them the rope so they can voluntary and eagerly hang each other in the name of the Truth. So the rest of us can actually "enjoy" normal society and actually do something about dishonest mercenary journalism without all the noise of litany chants from ratsphere in the background.
To me it seems that Scott is now becoming more mature and maybe he sees things more on the meta level. He realizes that some of rationalist rules can long-term lead to global Truth minimum by being attracted into local Truth maximum. We should be more careful and think about Truth in more abstract level, maybe saying that we just want to be meta-rule utilitarians can work - you can suspend some utilitarian rule in favor of other rule on some occasions like when dishonest journalists target people on our side. I for one am very happy, step-by-step at least Scott's part of the movement becomes a little bit more sane. Who knows, maybe one day he will also admit that people living in weird sex polycules may not be the most "rational" way of organizing the society. One can always dream.
But then maybe you are even more meta level as in this case I'd that it is a ultimately a very good thing that Gay is gone. Good riddance. So in a way Scott trying to indirectly garner sympathy for ghouls like Gay by making them comparable to his very own situation can be actually a proof for Scott still remaining hopeless. So maybe I should really just stay away and let orthodox rationalists duke it out with Scott in this round. Also I think attacking Ackman's wife is probably one of the more stupid moves to make, if anything I saw Ackman leaning even more strongly into his "conversion of Saul" position - not everybody can be as easily neutered as Scott back in the day when he disavowed The Motte as a result of the journalistic attack.
I’m forgetting the timeframe - was TheMotte.org operational when Scott was doxxed/had to disavow it?
Isn’t the meta-rule for a more global truth more geared for this? The example you give to stay the light of truth is just more friend-enemy distinction.
It was obvious for a long time that Culture War was not healthy for Scott's professional career as he continuously withdrew from touching it by longer and longer pole. TheMotte started as a thread under Slatestarcodex subreddit before getting separated after it drew some heat into its own subreddit and eventually moved over here. The overall thread is that Scott became more mellow and kept himself at distance from CW stuff - and not without reason.
As for Litany of Tarsky it cannot be taken that seriously as object of destruction can be anything: human life, some other value or even Truth itself. I take it more as just a stronger way of saying "be intellectually honest". It works if it is more inward looking - don't be afraid to be wrong in your intellectual pursuit and destroy your previous belief. It does not mean you have to be Pavlik Morozov and destroy your own family by "telling truth" to police about their misdeeds because they should be destroyed by the Truth. I don't think it is supposed to be an argument in favor of always telling the truth to Kant's inquiring murderer in the skin of NYT journalist - although the edgy style of writing and general disposition of rationalist community may actually lead many to exactly that conclusion.
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Scott was never doxxed because his identity was always a single google search away and he didn’t have a problem admitting it in real life. What he wanted to avoid was his patients and employers immediately seeing him as a public figure in a way that affected his day job, which is what the NYT article did.
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This is only semi-related to the article, but I can see an argument in the comments about how "Claudine Gay job was mostly administrative and scientific/academic credentials are not that important".
You think the mayor tells the schools how to teach kids or health department how to do it's job or sanitation how to pick up trash? But, get elected and suddenly they know police work.
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I don't actually know what point Scott is making. No one cared about Claudine Gay until she made a fool of herself in front of congress. And Rufo demonstrating he can take scalps is explicitly why he did it. But that doesn't make it wrong- she did commit plagiarism, and it is an offense that is supposedly a big deal in academia.
I think he forgot to put another one of these at the end maybe. Everything he wrote here is either obvious or sad.
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He seems incorrect regarding Brunet, as he seems to have published critiques of Gay before she became Harvard president.
I think someone mentioned this in the comments, yeah.
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I'm reminded of the recent effortpost about Saltburn reading near the end here. Journalists, for all the noble aspirations of the profession, seem no more immune to the cycle of vindictive popularity than the rest of us lowly humans.
Also, just to pick out a quote that jumped out at me:
Alas, as online fandom has shown, randos on the Internet are a good enough substitute for journalists in this regard.
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Can't say I was too impressed by this one. When you leverage your influence to take a stance on something, it's fair game to attack your influence. Journalists absolutely should be applying a higher level of scrutiny to people who speak out. If there's a problem there it's jourbalists' bias, not their methods.
If it’s fair game, then why were Spiers and others so eager to deny it?
Undermining opponents’ credibility is effective. It’s also considered gauche. Perhaps even a sign that one is acting in bad faith! This is not a coincidence; as Scott points out, that sort of strategy is symmetric. Agnostic to the truth.
For professionals who like to portray themselves as noble truth-seekers, that’s an awkward position. The mythos of American journalism is complicated, but I really do think it leans into “speaking truth to power.” Call it a legacy of the Cold War. The reflex, then, is to insist that whatever one is doing—no, it’s very cool and very countercultural.
I like it when that’s actually true. I’d like it to win out over the tribalistic, partisan allure of scoring easy points. If that means we don’t learn about the sex lives and past transgressions of people we’d never otherwise have met…so be it.
Mainly because most journalists are on one side of the equation. So long as smearing is only a tool the left can use against the right, smearing should be defended. The thing is that "smearing" isn't really the problem here, the problem is that the smearing only goes one way (due to the political distribution of journalists) and there's nobody in the other corner to defend you or counter-smear.
I think this is where our disagreement lies. I find personal details highly relevant to the value of someone's opinion. A professor who plagiarizes should not be given the same respect as one who does not. A philosopher who cheats on their spouse, likewise. Virtue clings to virtue; the more someone has their life in order the more attention I will pay to what they have to say.
That’s defensive, right? Spiers doesn’t want to be described as “get”ting people, so she’s denying that someone might have done it to Scott. (But if they did, then it’s all his fault…)
The category of smearing can’t be legitimized. If it were, then Rufo and others would get some of that legitimacy. More importantly, journalism would lose a lot of prestige. I think journalists would be largely unhappy with a world where media outlets were best known for publishing salacious personal details, even if all those details were always 100% true. It’s strictly less classy than the stereotype of hard-hitting investigative journalism.
Agreed.
I believe that:
Many things, such as Scott's doxxing, rape accusation investigations, and reporting on a politician's track record, qualify as "smearing."
Smearing is OK if it's accurate, and there aren't other broader issues such as rampant selection bias targetting only one side of an issue.
I think Spiers would disagree with #1, and basically say that if her side does it, it's hard-hitting investigative journalism, while if the other side does it, it's smearing. She'll rationalize this as being about intent--her side wants what's best for everyone; her opponents are solely motivated by pure malice--which is why she says it's ridiculous to suggest that her side's smears are actually smears.
Scott, meanwhile, doesn't seem to be aware of #2. He sees that smears can be used to portray only one side of a story, and therefore smearing is always bad. The thing is, the reason that's bad is because it's only portraying one side of the story, not because it's smearing specifically.
I think if we lived in a world where everyone suffered the degree of scrutiny that heterodox progressives suffer, Scott wouldn't have much of an issue with his treatment.
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It feels like vintage Scott to me. He is loudly and explicitly calling bullshit on a clearly false proposition. I didn't read him as making a huge value judgement here. To be a good Bayesian, you have to reason properly about the process that produces the evidence. People who don't operate on the presumption that the media "targets" people are going to be systematically wrong.
What's the false proposition?
I read it as saying "smearing is irrelevant" when I find it very relevant. More to the point, in the real world, where arguments are not usually logical propositions, I'm a big believer in ad hominem. I'm a lot less likely to look into someone's theory of quantum gravity if it turns out their phd was faked. Ad hominem is a very useful heuristic.
The media targetting people is a separate thing and has a lot more to do with media bias than with the smearing/sniffing out personal details itself.
The false proposition is "journalists don't target hitpieces against people they don't like".
I guess I'm not big on the plagiarism train because I already assumed Gay's academic credentials were hogwash. From [Wikipedia:]
This isn't quite the same as saying someone is "The L. Ron Hubbard Professor of homeopathy and psychoanalysis", but it's pretty darn close. I don't care if a homeopathy journal has a plagiarism scandal. That doesn't affect my opinion of it's accuracy.
You're already sold on homeopathy being bad, but a plagiarism scandal is absolute gold if other methods of convincing others that the journal is bunk have failed.
Well I'll definitely agree that's a false proposition, but to me the article seemed more focused on "hitpieces are bad" than on "actually journalists do write hitpieces."
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I'm going to make a different critique than most people, here :
This is hilariously naive. It's not just or even mostly journalists, in the same way that a pressure wave isn't just or even mostly any one particle.
There's a poster on tumblr named brazenautomaton, who's a bit of a mad artist in all of the best ways. One of those are his rants -- and I use the term as a compliment -- on popularity. I can't find the best one of the top of my head, but as a good example:
Yes, this is clinical depression, though see Scott re: Malcolm Muggeridge. It's also non-falsifiable: anyone who can be punished can't be popular, and anyone who is popular can't be punished. But it's also a pattern that exists.
Scott knows this, more intimately than most. It's not like that's even a one-off! But I can play examples of the confessed rapist you could not even discuss the 'allegations' of over at RPGnet, until they annoyed someone enough to get booted, and then the deluge. I can give examples as severe as alleged grooming and as minor as 'appropriated her own culture' in the furry fandom. Nor is it specific to online or the left: the pastor everyone loves until, posthumously, it turns out everyone had a horror story about is trope with a lot of recently-live examples. Nor it is about big stuff: the Friday Fun thread conversation about Palworld has some steelmen, but it's almost certainly downstream of some popular people wanting to start wars over AIgen.
You and I will do it too. It's hard to care for what's real, rather than what's talked about and what the people around you find important.
Maybe Scott doesn't think it necessary to say, maybe he knows that one of the big rules for being on the Inside is that you don't mention that there's an Inside.
But it's not just the journalists doing this, and I'm increasingly convinced that they're neither driving the stampede nor surfing the crowd.
I don’t agree with the second quote. I think the performance of wokeness is a fashionable belief that they tend to use either to get attention and praise or to distance themselves from the ordinary person who must hold more pragmatic ideals about themselves and the world. He’s in a sense showing off his position by arguing that life should be made harder for people like himself. He does this because as a successful entertainer, he doesn’t have to worry about DEI or similar programs because he isn’t applying for the kinds of jobs that are subject to those programs. Even in the acting community, they’re not going to skip a major star because he’s the wrong color. Casting a star means several million from the jump. It might affect more junior actors because they don’t yet have his draw, but he’s already got his.
This seems to be how these sorts of luxury beliefs work. They’re impractical, often doing real damage to lower class people who naively believe them and follow the advice. And rarely do those espousing those beliefs practice them in their own lives. I’ve yet to see any actor turn down a role to give it to a minority or a woman. It’s more often that they insist that others give up theirs to others. They don’t want to give up their roles, they want you to give up your promotion.
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